


Wanderlied einer Hausfrau

by queenallyababwa



Series: Impressions of Four Bad Parents [2]
Category: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - All Media Types
Genre: 1970s, 1980s, 2000s, Backstory, Bullying, Cold War, Eating Disorders?, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff, Frequent use of German terms of affection, German Sterotypes (?), Germany, In-Laws, Lots of it, Minor Original Character(s), Miscarriage, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Original Character(s), Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, Sister-Sister Relationship, Teen Romance, Unplanned Pregnancy, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 15:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6381103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenallyababwa/pseuds/queenallyababwa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title literally translates from German to "Hiking Song of a House Wife", which is a song by Edith Schwoller.</p><p>I admit, I am really excited about this one. I've kinda had Mrs Gloop's backstory planned out first from when I first got into the musical about 2 years ago so  the others just kinda followed after her. I personally think hers is one of the better ones in this series to be honest. </p><p>Spaetzchen = little sparrow by the way.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Wanderlied einer Hausfrau

**Author's Note:**

> Title literally translates from German to "Hiking Song of a House Wife", which is a song by Edith Schwoller.
> 
> I admit, I am really excited about this one. I've kinda had Mrs Gloop's backstory planned out first from when I first got into the musical about 2 years ago so the others just kinda followed after her. I personally think hers is one of the better ones in this series to be honest. 
> 
> Spaetzchen = little sparrow by the way.

Mittenwald, West Germany, 1979

The smell of coffee and something baking in the oven were always the first two things that Elsie Pottle smelled in the morning. No matter what season - spring, summer, autumn, or winter - Elsie's mother would be the first to rise to prepare breakfast for her family. The sun seemed to always been in competition with Elsie's mother to who could be up to greet the new day first. It was something very well known in the house, but seldom witnessed.

 

Two days into the summer holidays, Elsie followed in her mother's footsteps and awoke very early. Her younger sister, Viktoria, still lay asleep in the other bed on the opposite end of the room as early morning light started to fill the room, filtered through the cream colored curtains. The younger of the two Pottle daughters was buried under her comforter, cuddled next to the old, yellow tabby cat named Moppel, who only seemed to tolerate Viki. 

 

Not even bothering change out of her nightgown, Elsie avoided all of the particularly creaky floorboards and tripping over her still unpacked trunk that lay close to the door to let Viki continue on dreaming. 

 

Elsie walked down the stairs to the ground floor, through the Pottle living room, and stood in the threshold of the kitchen.

 

And there was her mother in her natural element.

 

Already at this hour, the kitchen was drenched in sunlight; everything seemed to glow with an unusual brightness. The little radio on the window sill before the sink was already turned to her mother's favorite classical music channel, Beethoven's "Mondscheinsonate" drifting lightly through the speakers. Mama took center stage, and, despite the early hour, wasn't dressed in her dressing robe, but rather in a cheery, bright blue floral dress, yellow-checkered apron tied around her waist, blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun at the base of her neck. Her makeup was applied just so.

 

But it wasn't just Frau Ursula Pottle's appearance that made her look so at ease, so happy, so perfect. There was just a fascinating sort of comfort as she kneaded the dough for the rolls, adding more flour with a practiced flourish. There was a smile on her face, unmatched to any other time of day. Not when one of her students showed mastery at a new piece as she sat down with them at the piano in the living room. Not when she was enjoying a drink and knitting something or other in her free time out in the garden. Only when she was in the kitchen, baking, cooking, did she seem to have this radiance of happiness to her. An impressive radiance of happiness that made Elsie want to sit and watch, observe.

 

It seemed, however, her mother's senses were so heightened when she was in this state, she instantly could tell there was an intruder spying on her.

 

"Up so early, Elsie?" Her mother asked, not even turning her head from her work on the dough. There was a light laugh to her voice, a richness that made it seem like the sentence was drizzled in honey. "Is Sister Gerta still ringing the bell in your dreams?"

 

Elsie laughed before admitting that was true - somewhat. "I think I am still off from coming home from school. You won't be able to get me out of bed soon enough." 

 

Frau Pottle then looked back at her daughter and said, "Well, don't just stand there, Spätzchen. You know how to make dough. Come and help me."

 

Elsie rushed over to her mother's side at once. She had been cooking with her mother for as long as she could remember. Some of her earliest memories were in the small kitchen, helping mash up berries for gooseberry tarts or mixing chocolate sauce for her mother's pretzel pie. She had always been welcomed to help any other time during the day, but this was her first time that she joined her mother with cooking breakfast, side by side.

 

Frau Pottle placed a little more flour onto the kitchen counter before backing away and letting her daughter take the wheel. While Elsie pushed and turned the dough on the board, her mother was nearby, putting water on to boil to prepare the eggs but also kept a keen eye on how the dough was coming alone. Along the way, she would offer a few words of aid to her daughter.

 

("Just a little bit harder. But not too much. Lovely.")

 

W Frau Pottle deemed the dough done, she show Elsie to cut it up just right for the rolls, before helping her settle the tray into the oven to bake with the other batch she had made. From there, her mother assigned her to various other tasks. As she supervised her daughter with cutting the tomatoes and cucumbers, she added a dash of kitchen wisdom here, sweetening the morning with anecdotes of Elsie's Omi teaching her own daughters - Elsie's mother and aunts - how to cook.

 

Soon enough Vati brisked into the kitchen, already wearing his uniform for Saturday morning chores - his old jeans and grey tee shirt. 

 

"Guten Morgen," he bided his wife and daughter as he walked over to his wife.

 

"Guten Morgen." Mama finished pouring coffee into a blue mug and handed it to Vati as he kissed her cheek. He accepted it gratefully but did not go immediately to seek out the creamer already on the breakfast nook's table along with the cold cuts, tomatoes,cucumbers, and the first batch of rolls. He instead looked down to his eldest daughter, who was busy fetching an egg from the water to put it into its holder.

 

"I think someone wanted to be sous chef this morning," he noted, looking down at his daughter and she looked back up at him for moment. He was a tall man, and very portly. Elsie and Viki might have inherited their mother's blonde hair, shorter stature, and rose-blushed freckled cheeks, but people always noted that he and Elsie had the same muted green-grey eyes. 

 

"I couldn't sleep any longer," Elsie told him as she held the egg holder out to him to accept. 

 

"If only your sister was more like you," he said, shaking his head as he took his egg and sat himself down at the table. She joined him at the chair next to him, and grabbed one of the buns because she was starving. "Hardly wanted to get up for school this year. But I seem to remember back then somebody else didn't want to get out of bed, either. What did those nuns do to you?"

 

Elsie looked innocently up at him as she had already had the bun in her mouth. She shrugged.

 

Vati laughed in his warm, Vati-way that boomed through the kitchen, filling the already tight, small kitchen. In that Vati sort of way that made her feel home.

 

"Never change, Spätzchen," he told her as he kissed her forehead before tucking his napkin in his collar. 

 

Elsie took another bite of her bread roll and looked around the sunny kitchen as an overwhelming sense of content filled her. She had been home a little less than forty-eight hours but she was still just as glad to be home as she was when she stepped off the long train ride from Munich and she saw Vati and Mama and Viki standing there on the platform, a box of chocolate in Mama’s hand, edelweiss and peach roses in Vati’s. As glad as she was to be home when she went up to her old bedroom at the end of the dinner they had in celebration and fell flat into the freshly washed sheets which smelled of the mountain air because Mama always dried them outside in the summer. As glad as she was to be home when Viki clambered out of her own bed (without Moppel, who was the only one who seemed impartial to Elsie’s coming home) that night and snuggled in next to her.

 

But how it burned to tell them the truth.

 

She tried to forget by deciding she wanted some of the homemade strawberry jam Mama made on the rest of her bread. She got out of her chair and went to the cabinet to fetch it when, over the beginning piano of Beethoven’s “Für Elise”, Elsie heard the clanging of a bicycle bell outside the open window.

 

“Otto!” She exclaimed, knowing that he was on his paper route around this time.

 

Otto had been a friend since childhood. When both he and Elsie were in primary school, his mother had conceived the idea that he should be respectable and learn to play the piano. And so, most Tuesday afternoons, he would walk back with Elsie to the Pottle house and would sit in the living room, practicing scales. Elsie, having not much to do after finishing her homework when her mother taught piano, liked to sit in and watch Otto clunk through the most basic of scales. After he was done practicing, he would stay behind and they’d go on a quest to find Moppel while he waited for his mother to pick him up. Or they’d play with Mama’s Hummel Dolls even if they weren’t supposed to. She'd talk. He'd laugh. They'd smile.

 

(And she wouldn't be lying if that as they grew older, Otto didn't seem to appear just that kid who clunked through Chopin anymore.)

 

They hadn’t been nearly as close in the past year because Elsie had spent the entire school year in Munich but she had missed nearly everything about Mittenwald. Including Otto. 

 

(She actually had really missed him.)

 

So she sprung at the opportunity to go meet him at the gate before he rode back into town.

 

She was already out of the kitchen door before her mother could chide her for going outside in her night clothes and without any type of shoes. The grass was still very slippery with dew as Elsie rounded the corner of the house, past the vegetable garden, towards the front of the house where she found Otto, standing on top of his bicycle to keep it steady as he was about to throw Der Spiegel against the blue door, aiming for a good hit. 

 

"Otto!" Elsie called as she breezed up the path leading from the street to her house to greet the boy at the gate. 

 

"Elsie?" He broke into a smile and lowered his arm. "When did you get back?"

 

"Friday evening," she replied, matching his grin. "Same day you got out on holiday, too." She stopped at the gate and leaned against one of the posts. "Just been too busy to go into town. How's your holiday been?"

 

"You mean all two days of it? Okay, I guess." He shrugged. "But what about Saint Maria? Was that half as lame as you made it sound? You wouldn't shut up about it before you went."

 

Elsie shrugged, too. She had been talking up Saint Maria for months before leaving. She had talked about how nice it would be to study in the big city. And to go to such a prestigious boarding school. And how wonderful it would be to have a roommate who by the end of the term would be like a sister to her. She had filled her head with dreams set on lofty clouds for months before actually arriving in the city only to be disappointed, made fun of, and left pining for the valley. 

 

"It was okay, I guess," she half-lied, half-mimicked Otto's tone. 

 

"Okay?" He laughed. "You were a lot more excited about it last year. What happened?"

 

She responded quickly. "Nothing. Just. . . it just wasn't as great as I thought it would be. That's all. Nothing happened."

 

"Are you going back?" He asked after a minute , obviously stunned at her rash reaction to his question. 

 

"No," she said shaking her head. Of course, she had yet to tell Mama and Vati this. But holiday was only a month long so it wouldn't be much longer until she needed to break the news. "I think I'm going back to school here." 

 

"Well, at least you won't be too far into school at that dumb, old place," he said, perhaps the tiniest bit satisfied that come autumn,she wouldn't return to Munich. "What's so bad about here, anyway? Why did you even want to leave, anyway?"

 

She actually didn't know anymore. Well, she did. But all her reasons seemed dumb now, wanting to leave the valley for the city. She didn't know why she'd want to leave this town. 

 

She shrugged.

 

Otto switched his subject and asked what she was planning to do this afternoon.

 

She didn't know. She'd probably be unpacking her trunk, working up the courage to say she would refuse to repack it for another year. 

 

"My family's going to the lake this afternoon. Want to come with us? We could have a picnic," he offered. 

 

A picnic at Ferchensee would be lovely. Sitting in the sunshine, enjoying a nice lunch, watching the hikers marvel at the commonplace mountain as they passed them by sounded infinitely more appealing than what was essentially cleaning her room.

 

"I'll have to ask," she told him, nodding excitedly. 

 

"Cool." Otto looked down at the paper in his hand and handed it to Elsie. "No use in throwing this if you're right here. I'll see you later, okay?" And with that, he hoped onto his bike and began to pedal into town.

 

Elsie took the newspaper and went back into the house, where her father was enjoying his egg and Viki had finally decided to join the rest of the family. She, like Elsie, was still in her pajamas, her hair uncombed, blonde curls sticking out in all sorts of wild ways. She tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes, but it wasn't quite working. Viki looked like she would totter over any minute and fall back asleep. She was only three years younger than Elsie, but she was smaller height wisethan Elsie had been at nine years old and her feet didn't even skim the kitchen floor as she sat in the chair. 

 

"Wipe your feet on the mat, please," Mama chastised as she was retrieving the orange juice from the refrigerator . Elsie went back a few steps and did so before handing her father the newspaper. 

 

"Thank you, libeling," he said as he flipped open the paper to start skimming the news, as he did every morning since Elsie could remember. 

 

"That was shorter than expected," Frau Pottle noted when Elsie joined the rest of the family at the kitchen table. "I would have thought you two would have talked longer - especially with how much you used to talk."

 

"Otto wants me to come with his family to Ferchensee this afternoon," she told her as she occupied herself with filling her plate. Elsie took another bread roll, along with two slices of cucumber, three hunks of ham, and some cheese. 

 

Mentioning the lake seemed to have woken Viki up just a little bit. "Oooh, Vati can we go?" She asked,trying to plead with her tired eyes.

 

Elsie had assumed that only she had been invited along to the lake with Otto's family, but she hadn't actually asked about the rest of the Pottles. Not that she didn't want Mama and Vati and Viki to come along with her, but, maybe for a brief moment, she felt very grown up that she was being asked out on a date. Well, not really a date. But he asked her to go.

 

"Well, that's up to your mother to decide," he said, not looking up from the newspaper. "I personally would want to go because I have a painting there I wanted to finish."

 

"Please, Mama?" Vicki's eyes shifted from her father straight to her mother. 

 

"The lake sounds like a great idea for the afternoon," she said, setting down two glasses of orange juice for Elsie and Viki. “I don’t have any lessons, today. But you -” she looked down to Elsie, who was already in the middle of a long sip of her juice, “- need to get that trunk squared away so we can go."

 

After breakfast, the Pottle family usually split up into the respective domains for a lazy Sunday morning, with plans to head out to Ferchensee around lunch time. Vati went out to the little garage out back where he kept his other hobby than painting mountains - his old Volkswagen beetle that allegedly was from the early 1950s, when her parents first met. As she went upstairs to her bedroom to change out of her nightgown, she glanced through the window at the top of the stairs and saw him toying around with the engine.

 

Downstairs, the sounds of Mama playing around with a few notes bled through the carpet of the bedroom as Elsie sat on the edge of her unmade bed, putting her long, blonde hair into a long plait. When she deemed it finished, she looked to the unopened trunk at the other side of the room. 

 

She looked back to her bed and decided that if she was organizing her clothes, then she would need a clean place to place it all. So she smoothed out her bed, tucking the pillows against the wall to give her optimal space to organize. 

But first, she thought she'd go through her purse. From within its depth, she pulled out half a dozen sweet wrappers, a piece of paper with Louisa's telephone number and home address, scribbled before leaving for the Munich train station, and her copy of Das doppelte Löttchen. (Which she had read before, but loved to read again and again.) 

 

Sighing, she opened the trunk and with that, she opened a whole term worth of memories - bad and good. The journal she and Louisa wrote in, passing it back and forth between classes, talking about the boys they liked. A collection of good marks on her English quizzes and Algebra tests, kept in a hefty folder. Scattered at the back of the folder, red-marked science reports. 

 

She pulled out the clothes and set them on her bed and tossing dirty blouses and navy skirts and red blazers in the hamper. The rest of the clothes went to be hung up in the shared closet, next to Viki's summer clothes. 

 

But then her eyes fell upon the scrunched up swimsuit at the bottom of the trunk. Black, considerably unflattering, unnoticeable, it wouldn't have bothered many of the other girls from Saint Maria. It was unbelievably modest and was what the school required for any girl who had been signed up to participate in the swim lessons they offered every Saturday afternoon. But when Elsie looked at the black blob at the bottom of the trunk, she thought back to what those other girls said, had did. 

 

It was obvious that Elsie wasn't tiny, stick-legged, skinny like the other girls. It was obvious in the school uniform, the way her skirt clung to legs, the way her buttons didn't sit quite right on her shirt. But in that swim suit, it was so . . . out there. 

 

She stood, shuddering, before the pool as Sister Agnes, whistle pursed between her lips, checked off Tanja, Alder - Kiefer, Berti - Miller, Anna - Papp, Julia, who whispered down the line to Pottle, Elsie the comments, the laughs, the pig snorts, like a telephone line.

 

I would have never even signed up for this class if I was her. 

 

Can pigs even swim?

 

At least fat floats. 

And it started to creep out of the pool house and into other places around campus. Angelika Bergmann asked if she wanted another helping or three of mashed potatoes at dinner. Elsie mumbled, "No" even if she was still hungry, having taken tiny portions of everything else when the meal started. When she stood up in class to sharpen her pencil she heard them snicker and snort like a pig as she walked by before dissolving into hushed laughter.

 

Tiny as those things were in the scale of things, they began to eat away her. All semester. She hadn't told anyone because she had tried to convince herself that it wasn't that big of a deal. 

 

(Even if it hurt so deep.)

 

Besides, what were the nuns going to do anyway? Make the entire sixth year class write I must not call Elsie Pottle a fat pig a thousand times? 

 

Didn't seem likely. 

 

So she kept silent, feeling worse and worse about herself, going between starving herself to lose weight and eating because it made her feel better. 

 

Elsie was still holding the swim suit when her mother knocked on the open door way.

 

She looked from her daughter to the swimsuit, Elsie's tear-filled eyes, sighed, and said, "I was waiting to have a talk with you." 

 

Elsie blinked."You were?"

 

Frau Pottle walked on the edge of Viki's unmade bed, pushing aside the stuffed monkey that had collected at the wooden baseboard, squashed against a pile of yellow and blue sheets and comforter. She patted the spot now unoccupied by the monkey and motioned for her daughter to sit with her. 

 

Elise first tossed the swimsuit onto her own bed, before she sat on Viki's and wiped away the tears that had started to form with the sleeve of her blouse. Mama wrapped her heavy arm around Elsie and pulled her close. She, like Vati, and Viki and the entire Pottle family it seemed like,was rounder and her hug was warm and soft and Elsie too comfort in it. 

 

"Something seems off about you, Spätzchen," Mama said when they broke. "Usually I cant get you to stop talking, but lately you've seemed so quiet about school that you were so excited about going to."

 

"Mama - " Elsie began and then stopped.

 

"Did you like Saint Maria?" Mamasked, straightforward. Blunt was always sort of Mama's way going about things, and she went right to what she wanted to know. But her tone of voice was softer, warmer than usual. "You really wanted to go, but this past term you seemed blue. Is there anything you wanted to tell me, Spätzchen?"

 

"They all laughed at me, Mama," she said quickly because it was burning on her chest.m

 

Mama sat up a little straighter, squaring her shoulders."Who did?"

 

"The girls at school, Mama, they were all so - so -" Thin. " so mean."

 

"What did they say to you?"

 

"They called me -" Fat. 

Mama understood. "I was afraid this was going to happen. It was like that way when I was a girl." She curled back to wrapping her daughter in her wings and tucked a stray blonde lock that had separated from Elise's plait. "Oh Elsie, you know you are a beautiful girl, right? And what those other girls say, they don't matter in the slightest. You're not fat, my Spätzchen. You are not a walking skeleton. You're healthy. You're good. So don't pay attention to what anybody else says - especially those girls at school. Alright?" 

 

Elsie nodded. 

 

But what Mama said didn't always solve every problem. Her words, her solutions, were not always a bandage over everything that bothered Elsie. As much as she tried to believe it. 

 

"But what about Saint Maria?" Elsie implored.

 

"What about Saint Maria?"

 

" Am I going back next term?"

 

Mama sighed again, "We'll have to have a talk with Vati about this, Spätzchen. Let's not dwell on this now." She stood up from the bed. "If you don't want to go swimming, you don't have to today. But your sister will be greatly disappointed if you don't join her." She looked back over her shoulder as she was leaving the room to go to the kitchen to pack the picnic lunch. "Just a thought."

 

Elsie looked over to the black blob of cloth sitting on her bed once again.

 

***

From the village to Fernchensee, it was not a very long walk. Many tourists in town would often hike there to swim in the warm waters in the summer and to get a perfect view of the mountains towering overhead. However, since Herr Pottle had decided to take his easel and his paints and a half-finished watercolor of the mountains and a few children and their parents languidly playing in the shallows of the lake below, the family decided to just take the old Beetle out to the mountain. 

 

In the back bench of the car, Elsie and Viki sat separated by the picnic basket and by a bag filled with towels and patchwork quilt. Viki was only in her blue checkered swimsuit, bouncing up and down excitedly as they neared the lake, eager to run straight from their parking spot into the warm water. 

 

Elsie, trying as she might to repeat her mother's words in her head, had put a loose skirt and a blouse over her swimsuit. 

 

They pulled up to the lake and as soon as Vati had pulled the keys from ignition, Viki swung open the door and sprinted off towards the water. 

 

"Look at her go," Vati said during a peal of laughter, watching his youngest daughter dart through lounging British tourists and hikers trying to take photographs. Viki splashed down into the water, laughing like mad.

 

Elsie pulled out the picnic basket and the quilt, carrying it down towards the shoreline. As she walked down the hill, she saw the Gloop family with their own picnic spread, under the shade of a linden tree. 

 

Otto was sitting on the blanket, eating from a bag of crisps when Elsie and the rest of the Pottle family approached. "Long time no see," he called to Elsie.

 

Frau Gloop waved hello to the other family as she set the crime novel she was reading aside. Herr Gloop was sleeping under the shady branches, his hat placed over his beardy face. The youngest Gloop boy, Georg, was already splashing in the water with Viki, whom was not much older than him herself. Pleasantries were exchanged, the families not exactly being super close, but Ursula and Hannelore could talk and talk and talk just the same. Vati went in search of the perfect place to set up his easel.

 

And so that let Elise and Otto ( and Ingrid, Otto's seventeen year old sister, who was basking the sun, away from the tree and away from the rest of her family) on their own. Elsie began to apply sunblock on her face, hoping to come home with no more freckles than when she arrived to the lake.

 

"Elsie come in, the water's fine!" Viki cried standing up in the shallows, waving her arms to get her sister's attention.

 

"Do you want to join her?" Otto asked, standing up and whipping the crisp crumbs away from his mouth with the back of his arm.

 

"You're gonna get cramps." Ingrid warned, still staring up at the sun with her sun glasses. "You have to wait half an hour after eating to go swimming."

 

"Says who?" Otto retorted as Elsie peeled off her blouse first and then the skirt. She held her breath the entire time and when Otto finally looked back to her, he didn't say anything. Nothing at all.

 

(But it exactly wasn't like he was a twig, either. )

 

It was just the two of them as he tossed his shirt down on his sister, who only mumbled, "Rude" to Otto and turned onto her front to sun her back, the two of them as he asked (or rather demanded) a race down to the shore.

 

(He let her win.)

 

The wind was light and sweet with the smell of full summer as they frolicked in the sun warmed shadows, their laughter carried on the breeze blowing through the valley. Viki tried to play a (unsuccessful) game of chicken. Otto thought it'd be funny to sneak under the water and grab Elsie around the ankles, giving her a terrible fight and causing her to scream and laugh at the same time. They swam so freely under the bright afternoon sun. 

 

(And they didn't get cramps.)

 

(Elsie forgot all about the swimsuit thing. Forgot all about girls laughing at her.)

 

Everything was so perfect until they decided to got deeper in the lake. 

 

Water usually never freaked her out. A swimming pool was perfectly fine. She never was scared, never was terrified of diving into a part where her feet couldn't touch the bottom.

 

So why was she so scared now?

 

As Otto and Viki pulled out more towards the middle of the lake, the water got less and less friendly, cold and murkier. Uncertain. Else watched as her sister and her friend so easily dove into the deeper depths, just like this was the shallows.

 

And they kept calling her to join the fun.

 

She couldn't do it. She was scared. 

 

"Come on, Elsie!" Her sister encouraged. "It's fun out here!"

 

Her feet could barely touch and when they did the ground was so muddy and she felt a fish or something whizz past her legs and she was so uncomfortable.

 

"Uh, I'm going back to the blanket to dry off for a bit," she stumbled to tell them,slowly backing away, away from the deeper water towards the safety of the shallows. And as much as Otto and Viki pleaded, she went back up to the shore.

 

At the little camp of blankets and towels and picnic baskets the Gloops and the Pottles had set up, she plopped herself down at the edge of the quilt from home. Her mother was knitting a lacy shawl while Frau Gloop was talking about . . . something adulty.

 

"Tired, Spätzchen?" Mama asked her, during a pause in Frau Gloop's story and a break in the pattern of her knitting, letting the shawl spill into her lap as she reached for the picnic basket.

 

Elsie looked back at them. "Yeah." She was too embarrassed to admit, after all, that deep water frightened her. 

 

Mama pulled out a sandwich wrapped in paper. "Here," she handed the package to Elsie." Have something to nibble on."

 

And so Elsie unwrapped the sandwich (ham and cheese) and ate silently as she watched her sister, so innocent, laugh like a little nymph in the green water with Otto and his brother, and Vati paint the Bavarian summer sky.


End file.
